The candidate portal provides exciting options for your entire candidate population to interact with your program—any time of the day or night—without the need to contact support or wait for a response. Within the Portal, candidates can update their profile, complete applications, track their training and exam history, view their eligibility and upcoming exam status, monitor their credential status, access benefits such as e-Certificates, logos and discount codes, and share their transcripts and digital badges.

Profile Management

Candidate profiles can be created in a variety of ways with the CertMetrics Candidate Portal. For some programs, candidates create their own account through completing a custom registration application. For other programs, candidate profiles are created using information acquired from the testing center with no human interaction necessary. Some programs may integrate candidate profiles with their existing systems such as a learning or association management system. Once an account is created, program staff and the candidates have the ability to see or manage any data to which they have been given access and update it accordingly. This includes updating contact information, education, employment history, and other program specific information. Candidates can be required to review their profile on a regular basis as well as sign agreements to participate within the testing program.

Training and Exam History

The History page provides a list of a candidate’s exam history and other certification requirements (e.g., training, courses, applications, signed agreements) that are within the system. Many programs also work with Alpine to design PDF score reports with applicable feedback on how the candidate performed on the exam. Score reports templates allow for providing different feedback based on whether a candidate passed or failed the exam.

Candidates may also upload testing requirements needed for calculating eligibilities or determining credential status along with the associated proof of completion. These uploaded items can either be auto-approved or require approval before they count as a requirement. This page also provides the candidate with access to view the Exam Catalog and available exams.

Credential Status

The Credential Status page provides candidates with important information regarding the status of their credentials including any progress on earning, renewing, or re-activating their credentials. Candidates can also download available e-Certificates and logos and share their credentials to LinkedIn.

Behind the scenes, the Credentialing Engine within CertMetrics manages ‘credential logic’ for both earning a credential and renewing the credential. The renewal process can contain its own logic independent of the initial logic requirements and can be made up of applications, training, attestations, agreements (code of ethics), documents, fees, exams, labs, miscellaneous requirements, and other credentials. Built into the system is an optional “suspended” status that provides a grace period after the credential expires.

When a hierarchical order exists to multiple credentials—such as a beginner, intermediate, and advanced credential—linked logic is used to update the expiration date of lower-level credentials when a higher-level credential is earned or renewed. Linked logic works by updating the lower-level credential(s) expiration dates to match the higher-level credential expiration dates. Thus, candidates are required to keep only their highest-level credential active through the renewals.

Sharing

CertMetrics provides powerful tools for candidates to promote their accomplishments and at the same time market your testing program in positive light though the use of digital badging and transcripts.

The CertMetrics Badging Feature is an optional core feature that gives testing programs the ability to issue badges to candidates in recognition of a candidate’s accomplishments within a testing program. Common accomplishments for which a badge may be issued include earning a credential or micro-credential, passing an exam, completing program-specific milestones called achievements, or participating in program-sponsored event or training course. Within CertMetrics, candidates can manage and share these badges to common social media sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter), display badges within an email signature, and by clicking on a shared badge, third parties can verify candidate accomplishments including the criteria required to earn the badge and the period for which a badge is valid. Alpine follows the Mozilla Open Badges standards for issuing and verifying badges. To learn more about these badging standards, visit www.openbadges.org.

While badging only highlights one accomplishment at a time, transcripts enable candidates to share some or all of their accomplishments at once by creating a custom transcript and then emailing it out, posting it online, or sharing it to social media sites. This provides a convenient way for candidates to share their accomplishments to employers, potential employers, membership organizations, licensure and acquaintances.

Finally, CertMetrics integrates with fulfillment houses to send printed certificates, t-shirts, mugs, plaques or any other item you wish to have mailed out.

Benefits

One of the major challenges for testing programs with multiple credentials is to keep candidates involved and actively progressing beyond just the entry level certifications. The benefits feature encourages and incentivizes candidates to move forward within the testing program by awarding benefits such as discount coupons or training/exam vouchers to candidates as they a credential. This optional core feature also offers programs a unique opportunity to increase visibility for the program and its certifications through enabling certified candidates to purchase exclusive merchandise from a company or third-party store. Benefits are an easy way to market to an audience that is already familiar with the testing organization and encourage candidates to progress.

Standings

Increase candidate participation within your testing program by recognizing candidates who meet critical program milestones such as actively holding multiple credentials at the same time or keeping a credential active for minimum number of years such as a 5 or 10-year mark. The optional core Standings feature allows you to recognize these candidates and even award them a special badge or benefit. By utilizing this feature and granting candidates a standing to celebrate their accomplishments, you can encourage candidates to stay active or achieve higher level credentials in your program. This feature allows candidates to promote their accomplishments and your testing program through sharing these accomplishments on their transcripts, through e-Certificates, or by posting their digital badges to social media.

Testing programs determine which event-based emails to enable and customize the text and content using plain text or HTML. Additionally, each email may be translated into any language for those candidates residing outside English-speaking countries. If a client requires additional event-based emails, those emails may be set up and customized during the implementation phase of the project. All emails sent to the candidate are tracked under the history and recent emails may be resent to the candidate. Alpine currently sends all emails through its own webservers.

Within the CertMetrics candidate portal, programs may elect to use the optional core news article feature, with announcements that can be created by client administrators based on many different filters including specific dates, exams passed/failed, earned credentials, and exam eligibility/enrollment. Using this functionality, programs have the ability to create announcements and display them to specific segments that a client wishes to target within their testing population. Programs use announcements to provide exam-specific instruction regarding enrollment and testing, provide education to failed test takers, notify candidates of program changes, and for other marketing purposes.

The U.S. Department of Justice has published proposed amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act. These changes could have a direct impact on the credentialing and assessment industry. The proposed changes can be found at www.ada.gov.